The inequality of mercy

Disability, death and confusion

There are three current news stories relating to death and disability and to public attitudes towards the relationship between the two.

Each throws up a different anxiety about the right to life.  Each also highlights the alarming possibility of a highly confused set of legal parameters resulting in open season being declared on disabled people.

Does anyone have the right to decide that it’s time for someone else to die?  If they exercise that right, what makes it murder, assisted suicide, the exercising of a choice on someone else’s behalf or a mercy killing.

And surely, the claim that if “Compassion” can be shown to be the primary motive for the action, then it’s justifiable,  risks being naive.

Kay Gilderdale was acquitted on a charge of attempted murder having injected her daughter with a lethal cocktail of drugs.

Meanwhile, Frances Inglis from Dagenham Essex has been convicted of murdering her son Tom with a lethal injection of heroine as he lay unconscious and brain damaged in a care home.  Here again she and her family claimed “Mercy” as her motive.

Amid all this, he Scottish parliament has been debating a bill put forward by Margot McDonald SMP which aims to better enable assisted suicide in Scotland.

In the Inglis case, the victim was given two grams of heroine, enough, his mother understood, to end his life, on the basis that she believed that this was what he would have wanted.  He was in no position to say what he actually would have wanted.

Her decision was made and acted upon unilaterally.  She is now serving a life sentence for murder.

Kay Gilderdale had offered a guilty plea to the lesser charge of Assisting a suicide for which she will not now be prosecuted.

If Ms McDonald’s bill is passed, the likelihood of more cases ending similarly is increased.

The case that this leaves disabled people less empowered, more “Vulnerable” that is, subject to the belief or whim of a carer or family member is an open and shut one.

Surely this should give SNPs pause for thought.

As for the assumptions which are not only freely expressed but accepted on the value of the lives of disabled people and the pervading attitudes This whole sorry mess reveals, some people may well be becoming very afraid.